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It’s that time of year again — when you kick yourself for not starting to plan your organization’s year-end fund raising appeal earlier. But there is still time to whip together a guerrilla campaign using email and online donation tools, even if you’ve never done it before.

If you have a list of supporters’ email addresses and can put in about 24 hours’ worth of time, in about two weeks you can salvage this year’s online appeal and learn some valuable lessons to help you in the future. Let’s break it down into seven steps.

1. Figure out if you have enough email addresses to make the effort worthwhile.
In two weeks you can craft a strategy and get started with the tools, but you’re not likely to be able to build a useful list of email addresses from scratch. How many reasonably up-to-date email addresses do you have? As a rule of thumb you can expect a donation from about 1 percent of your list. If you send an email to 1,000 people, expect about 10 of them to donate. However, online donors typically give slightly larger average gifts than other donors. If your email list is substantial enough to make your appeal worth the time, move on to step two.

2. Set up a broadcast emailing package.
If you’ve never emailed in bulk before, you’ll need a software tool to help. Check to see if your donor or constituent database offers blast emailing. If not, don’t resort to everyday email tools like Outlook or Apple Mail. Online broadcast email services let you more effectively format and track emails, and help ensure they reach your supporters’ inboxes.

There’s no shortage of affordable online options for blast emailing. VerticalResponse provides sophisticated functionality, and up to 10,000 free emails per month for nonprofits. ConstantContact is a little less powerful, but a little easier to use, and starts at $5 per month. Most of these tools are quick and easy to purchase online, but plan to dedicate a few hours to learning them and importing your email addresses before you’re good to go.

3. Get set up to take online donations.
There’s a number of ways to accept online donations by credit card. You could simply point potential donors to your organization’s page on Network for Good (www.networkforgood.org), which is automatically created if you’re in Guidestar. Network for Good takes 4.75 percent off the top of any donations you receive, and will send you a check for the rest. Click and Pledge (www.clickandpledge.com) provides another straightforward option that integrates more with your Web site. The firm also takes 4.75 percent off the top.

If you receive a lot of donations, you might want to take a broader look at software after the year end because you can likely find less expensive options , but these are great for the fundraiser in a hurry.

4. Think through your story and strategy.
As with all fund raising techniques, compelling pitches are more successful. Why should people donate to your organization? What specific change w ill their donations support? Consider providing stories or images of specific people you’ve helped, or examples of past projects that were successful. Think very carefully about what’s likely to be most compelling to your supporters.

5. Write the emails.
With your story in mind, plan and write the actual emails you’ll send to potential donors. Email appeals work best as part of a campaign rather than standalone. For example, a first email could describe your request and why it’s important. A second email could serve as a reminder, and provide a story or two to back up your claims. A nd then, a final email on the last day of the year could offer a “Last Chance to Donate in 2008!”

Try to keep emails short and concise, and provide prominent, specifically worded donation links as calls to action. Writing good fund raising emails is more art than science. For a terrific primer, read “The Mercifully Brief, Real World Guide to Raising Thousands (If Not Tens of Thousands) of Dollars with Email,” by Madeline Stanionis.

6. Plan how you’ll track and manage the campaign.
When those donations start pouring in, how will you manage them? For this guerilla campaign, you’ll likely have to manually enter them into your donor management system, or upload them via spreadsheet from the online donation tool. Both are manageable under the circumstances, but you might want to consider other options for a longer-term program. Manual processes tend to be error-prone.

Also, assign the campaign to someone on staff who can troubleshoot problems, answer questions, track progress and make a final call on whether it was all worthwhile.

7. Send out the emails.
With your strategy, tools, copy and tracking system in place, you’re ready to send out the campaign’s first email. Fire away, and see how it goes — and don’t be afraid to tweak your plan or emails if the response suggests revisions are in order.

A campaign put together in two weeks probably won’t compare to one carefully crafted with months of planning and strategizing, but simple campaigns can be surprisingly effective.

If nothing else, you’ve learned a few things, and you can apply that experience and knowledge to next year’s campaign. Because next year, you’re going to start early — right?

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This article was provided by Idealware, which provides candid information to help nonprofits choose effective software. For more articles and reviews, go towww.idealware.org.

According to an article in the Jan. 14th issue of The Chronicle of Philanthropy, nonprofit experts often complain that they can’t get members of their boards to effectively raise money.

But the problem is usually more about the nonprofit organization’s leadership than it is about the motivations of its volunteer board members, writes the anonymous author of The Nonprofiteer. “You’re not really authorized to critique the fund-raising incompetence of your doctor and lawyer board members until you can remove an appendix or argue a Supreme Court case without their assistance,” the author writes. “It’s their volunteer gig, but it’s your job, so the responsibility rests with you.

”To get board members to raise more money, the author says development officials and executives need to show them how it’s done — and set reasonable goals. The author urges nonprofit leaders to ask board members to: Look at a list of current donors and identify those they know. After they do that, ask them to come along when you solicit in person.

Come to the next board meeting with the names of at least two people to be added to the list of the potential donors. Help plan a benefit event. What has your organization done to get its board members more involved in its fund-raising efforts? Do most board volunteers have what it takes to solicit donors?

Greatness lives among us. Nick Anderson, a teenage from Conway, Mass. approached Oxfam about going to Darfur after co-founding a successful national high school challenge to raise awareness and funds for Darfur by using the social networking site, Facebook.

As the co-founder of a highly successful fundraising initiative, Nick helped to raise more than $300,000 for the people of Darfur. But not content to stop there, he approached Oxfam with an idea: If he could visit Darfur he could help create a vital link between a growing group of youth activists here in the United States and Darfur teens forced to spend years in the camps.

As premier international organization committed to creating lasting solutions to global poverty, hunger, and social injustice, Oxfam readily agreed. Before Nick left, Oxfam, asked him what the single most important thing was that he wanted to accomplish on this mission.

He said he hoped to bring back an experience that would touch the hearts of American teenagers. He wanted to find a way for his friends—and teenagers like them—to identify with the youth of Darfur and feel moved to help them as peers.

In late July, Nick Anderson left for a one-month mission to Dafur as Oxfam Humanitarian Youth Ambassadoron. What Nick found was sobering. More than four years of fighting in that remote western region of Sudan has forced 2.5 million people from their homes.

Many of them have flocked to overcrowded camps for safety. Others have squeezed into towns bursting with displaced people. Yanked from their homes and villages—and the social and civic framework those places provided—Darfur’s youth are now growing up in an environment riddled with fear and boredom.

Nick heard about their hunger for places to gather, for simple pleasures like balls with which to play sports, for basic improvements to health standards, for books, for safe ways to get to school—and the list goes on. Returning with first hand accounts on what it’s like to live in Darfur, Nick says more Americans—particularly young Americans—must learn about the ongoing violence and humanitarian crisis in Darfur and help support those who will be struggling to rebuild their lives and their homes.

“Wherever I went you could hear the sound of gun shots. There were armed men around every corner,” said Anderson. “I couldn’t understand how violence like that could be so routine.”

Commenting on conversations he had with a local he was traveling with, Anderson noted, “to me it’s a disaster, to him, it’s life.” In Kebkabiya, a small town that has seen its population swell to over 60,000 people after thousands settled there to escape attacks on their own villages, he spoke with young people, ranging in age from 14 to 20, who had been displaced from their homes and are living in temporary shelters.

He asked them all the same question: “If there was one thing you could ask Americans to help you with, what would it be?” Anderson found that the responses varied little regardless of whom he asked.

He heard two things consistently —the need for health care and technical training for jobs. The health care Anderson heard about is not what immediately comes to mind in the U.S. “They need shovels to fill in holes and ditches in their schoolyards because during the rainy season, stagnant pools of water form and become breeding grounds for mosquitoes that carry infectious diseases like malaria.

In addition, many of the young people in Darfur are looking for training in technical skills—things like carpentry and metalwork so they can get jobs and help to rebuild their communities,” said Anderson.

Also, he observed that young people did not have any way to become active participants and leaders in their communities, to have a voice in what was happening around them. Now back in the U.S., his personal goal is “To define us as a generation that takes action and one that cares about such important causes as the one in Darfur.”

Check out Nick’s You Tube video here. Now, get into action, and consider supporting this important cause.

What is particularly important is to notice that 50 percent of these reasons are within your control. Therefore, manage these potential pitfalls. It’s much easier to keep a donor, than to find a new one:

Feeling other causes were more deserving (27%)

No long able to afford support (22%)

No memory of supporting the charity (11%)

Donor supporting charity by other means (7%)

Donor relocated (7%)

Death of donor (5%)

Charity’s communications were inappropriate (4%)

Charity didn’t remind donors to give again (3%)

Charity asked for an inappropriate amount (3%)

Charity didn’t inform donor how contribution was used (2%)

Are you doing all you can to keep your donors aware of what you are doing with their donations?

The Foundation Center is one the nation’s best resources for grant seekers. It’s a great place to start your search for potential funders, because the Center has profiles on some 80,000 grant makers, detailing their areas of interest, grant history, and other pertinent information.

Grant seekers can visit one of the libraries (located in Washington, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Cleveland) and use the substantial resources. The Foundation Center also makes print, CD-ROM, and online editions of its resources available for purchase, with prices beginning at $19.95 a month for an online subscription.

But, the Foundation Center can do much more than help you identify funding sources. A wide variety of basic, intermediate, and advanced online and classroom trainings are available year-round. In addition, an array of informational resources can be accessed via the organization’s Web site. To learn more or to start finding potential funders, visit http://foundationcenter.org.

A new online database makes it easy for a nonprofit organization to get information about federal spending and local statistics that might influence their work.

The National Priorities Project Database provides data from 1983 to the present in the categories of basic demographic information, education, health, housing, hunger, income and provider, labor and military, which can be searched by county or by state.

For example, people can search the database to find out that median household income in Illinois in 2002 ranged from $25,058 in Alexander County to $69,760 in Kendall County.

They can also learn that residents in Imperial County, CA – which has the highest percentage of children living in poverty of any county in the state – received almost one-third less money for low-cost housing, through a program known as Section 8, in 2003 than they did in 1993, when adjusted for inflation.

A service of the National Priorities Project, a nonprofit group in Northampton, Mass., the free Web site also offers tools that allow people to make graphs with the results of their searches, adjust the data for inflation, and save their searches to view again.

About the Author

Bill Freeman has worked in the nonprofit and cause-related arena for over 25 years.
From social services and higher education to healthcare and grassroots activism, he has been a catalyst in developing leadership and implementing programs that effectively respond to pressing social challenges. Learn more »